Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

December 19, 2016

Thanks to my correspondent Sam, who alerted me to the fact that it seems another social media search engine, Smashfuse, has died. I wrote about this one back in May 2014 and it was a neat little search engine, providing access to a wide variety of social networks with results delivered in a tile based format. Not one that I used a great deal myself, but it's always sad to see more engines disappearing.

December 16, 2016

The death of human moderated search engines continues as one of the longest surviving - perhaps THE longest surviving version has now closed its doors. A human moderated search engine is one where you can ask your question, and it will be passed onto a real live person to give you an answer. In total ChaCha answered about 2.25 billion questions, had 100,000 guides and employed about 440 people. At its peak it had about 370 million page views in August 2012, and this had dropped to 6 million in November 2016.

It really does seem that this type of engine doesn't work. Mahalo tried and failed, as did TrueKnowledge and we're currently left with AskJelly and Answerbag with probably the best being WikiAnswers. The fatal flaw in these things seems to be two fold. Firstly, there's no structure to it; serious questions sit side by side with trivia, and you can't ever be sure that your query is going to be answered already, so you have to wait some time before it is, and most people want answers *now*, not in a few hours time. Secondly, who is the person giving you the answer, and can you trust them? Not so bad if it's a straightforward question with a factual answer, but anything that has even a slight nuance is going to subject to the attitude and opinions of the person answering.

December 15, 2016

It looks as thought Social Mention - real time search engine may well have died. I've been trying it every day for the last week, and I have been unable to reach it. I've tried a few of the services to see if the site is up or down, and they've all come back and said that it's unavailable. This will be a real blow to social media searchers, as it's always been an excellent engine, and it will be sorely missed if it has closed. There have been a few queries on their Facebook page, but no response from the company. If anyone knows anything official - please add it into the comments!

December 14, 2016

There are times when I almost (but not quite) feel sorry for Google, because whatever it does, it's going to be wrong. Let's quickly go over the basics again before we start. Google is not a search engine, it's an advertising company using search to make money. Google doesn't care about the results that it provides because it's using its algorithms to work out why one result is better than other. It relies on the world to tell it what's good or bad, and it acts merely as a mirror or a reflection of society. Google is not there to give you the 'right' result, since there isn't a right result. In a sense, that's quite admirable, because it's leaving the user to make up their own mind as to the relevance or authority of a site, and it's not making that call for them. That's all good and wonderful as long as the user is capable and able of making that judgement call, and is savvy enough to realise that what they see is not necessary what is true accurate and correct.

So if I ask Google 'did the flimflam band exist?' I'm happy enough for Google to return a result that says 'No it didn't, and this is why'. However, when we get to something like the Holocaust, it's a rather different matter, especially when we see this:

Similarly if you do a search for 'Martin Luther King' you'll get a racist site, and if you recall recently if you searched for 'three black teenagers' you got sites that tended to imply that such youths were criminals. As reported on Gizmodo Google says it is "“saddened to see that hate organizations still exist,” but it does “not remove content from [its] search results, except in very limited cases such as illegal content, malware and violations of our webmaster guidelines.” The Google spokesperson made sure to add, “The fact that hate sites appear in Search results does not mean that Google endorses these views.”" This is disingenuous at best, or if your attitude towards Google is like mine, it's a straight out lie. It's a lie because Google quite happily removes material when asked to by Governments for starters - we see this under the 'right to be forgotten' ruling for starters. Furthermore, Google could quite easy, and DOES remove content from search results when it finds 'Google bombs'. These used to exist a lot in the past - do a search for 'liar' and the first result would be a biography of George Bush or Tony Blair for example. Google realised that it was being 'gamed' and changed the system so that it couldn't happen again.

Google has chosen not to do that this time. It's perfectly obvious that Google is being gamed, with links to that specific result coming from Stormfront itself, the Wikipedia and other right wing/racist websites. As with the MLK example, people link to it, Google decides that's an important indicator of value, and moves the site further up the ranking. In and of itself it's a perfectly acceptable way to help rank results, but as I say, it's open to being abused. I know it's happening, so do you, and so does Google, but Google has chosen to do nothing. I understand why Google doesn't want to remove material - I think the Stormfront site is vile, but that's just my opinion and it shouldn't hold any more weight than that of an extreme right wing racist. Google isn't a global police force, nor should it act like one.

However, it has a level of responsibility. It's responsible to the people who use their service - just because we don't pay for it it doesn't mean they can skip off into the sunset whistling a happy tune. It's responsible to its advertisers and to its shareholders to provide a service that does the job people expect it to - giving them the information that they want. If I want to see racist websites that deny the holocaust, then Google shouldn't stop me seeing them. However, and this is the thing - there's a difference between that, and giving a site a coveted #1 spot in their results because their algorithm is being played. This is neither moral or ethical, it's a cop out. Google is prepared to intervene to remove instant suggestions that imply that Jews are bad people for example, so their holier than thou 'we don't fiddle with our results' is, as I've said, a blatant lie.

Let's look at other engines - Bing has the Stormfront page on their first page of results, but interestingly the summary that they use actually contradicts the Stormfront title. DuckDuckGo has a completely different set of results, all of which start with discussions about holocaust denial, with the Stormfront way down the page. Yahoo (who are they again?) doesn't have it on their first page of results. Yandex does follow the Google line, with the first two results denying that it took place. So it's not a clear cut answer, but there's plenty of ways of insuring that the result which is getting people angry isn't necessarily in a prominent place. So is there any way around all of this?

A solution is obvious - in a small number of cases, such as this, Google could intervene and remove sites in exactly the same way that they have done with the right to be forgotten results, but with one difference. They already have a situation where they show a small number of results but say there are more, but very similar, and does the searcher want the search re-run with all the results available? At the bottom of the page Google could, quite easily, have a link that says 'Some results have been removed from the results but you can view them if you wish'. That way the casual searcher doesn't see racist stuff on their screen, Google hasn't deleted anything, and is still leaving it up to the end user to decide what they want to do with the results they are getting.

Google is making a choice not to do this, and instead has chosen to leave racist results at the top of the screen. That's their call. Yours is to decide if you want to continue to use it or not.

December 01, 2016

There's an Amazon global store at https://www.amazon.co.uk/b?ie=UTF8&node=11125348031 which allows you to buy products directly from the US. Books, clothes, DVDs, luggage, shoes and bags. Delivery can be as little as 2 days, and prices include all import duties and taxes. You can also return items and use UK customer service. I haven't tried it yet myself, but it might be worth a quick look!

November 16, 2016

Want to see what swines have refused your friends requests on Facebook? It's really easy to do it. 4 steps, 5 seconds ...

Step One

Click on the Friends Icon on your Facebook page, upper right hand corner.

Step Two

Click on 'See All' at the bottom of the list.

Step Three

In the top left hand corner of the dialogue box that pops up you'll see an option 'No New Friends Requests' unless you currently have some pending. Below that, you'll see another option called 'View Sent Requests'

Step Four

Click on that, and you'll see a listing of everyone that you've sent requests to who haven't responded. You now have a nice list of people that you don't need to worry about sending Xmas cards to!

If you're looking for reasons to try out DuckDuckGo and haven't quite got around to it, perhaps this blog post might give you the push you need. Here are a few things that you can do on DDG that you can't do on Google - or if you can, it's more difficult.

Using the ! search option

I can search different resources while I'm on DDG, which obviously I can' t do in Google, Simply using the ! or 'bang' command, I can tell DDG to run a search on a different search engine or site. So for example a search for !googleuk search_term will search on the Google UK site for me. Why would I want to do that? Simply because Google then doesn't know who I am, so I don't get results that are tainted by personalisation. Alternatively, if I wanted to search say, Wikipedia, rather than fuss around with site: the way that I have to with Google, I can simply do !w search_term and get to exactly what I need.

Simple cheatsheets

This doesn't work with every single tool that's out there, but a search for Cheatsheet Google gives me an entire list of the basic commands that I can do on that search engine. Looks a bit like this:

Up or down?

There are plentyof sites that will tell you if a site is up or down, but if I'm already using DDG, why bother to go elsewhere? Simply ask 'is <site> down and you'll quickly find out.

Color codes

You probably won't need this one very often, but it's useful to have, and besides, it does bright up a blog posting! If you want to see what the value of colours are, simply type in color codes and feast your eyes.

Change text

This is an oddity, and I have no idea why you can do it, but you can. If you have a bunch of text and you want to go from upper to lower case, type or paste it into the search box, with lowercase in front of it. You'll then a box with your text all in lower case.

(No, it doesn't work the other way around though - how mad is that?)

Create a QR code

I know everyone seems to hate QR codes, but they do have a value now and then. Simply type qr before a URL and get a QR code for that site.

Expand a shortened URL

Short URLs from sites like bit.ly can be really useful, but the problem is that you don't know where they are taking you until you're there. DDG allows you to expand the URL to see exactly what it is without taking you anywhere at all.

Create strong passwords

Simply tell DDG how long you want the password to be, and it will create it for you.

(Yes you can get it to create weak passwords by simply using password 8 weak, but not sure why you'd want to!)

So there you go - a few fun and useful things that you can do on DuckDuckGo that you can't do on Google.

November 15, 2016

'Don't trust Google' is something I say a LOT. Here's another example. If you go to the search engine and do a search for 'final election results' this is what you'll see. Well, maybe you'll see it, maybe you won't, depending on where you live, what you search, if you had eggs for breakfast and the colour of your eyes:

Clearly shows that the results are 61,039,676 to Clinton and 60,371.193 to Trump. Now, figures are still not entirely finalised I understand, so the result obviously isn't going to change (and that's decided by the electoral college anyway, not the popular vote).

However, underneath this result is this:

Now, I couldn't get exactly that myself, but on my iPad I was able to see this version:

Now, the site in question is 70news, and the figures that it quotes are simply not true. if you look at their website - I'm not linking, but you can find it at 70news then dot and then wordpress.com/ - you see this:

This figure is still wrong and none of what is said there is right. It's not clear just WHY Google has decided to link to this site, particularly so given that they so recently said that they were going to be fact checking the news! If you want to know the exact results, head across to the Washington Post, which currently has the figures at 61.32 for Clinton and 60.54 for her opponent. A rather different situation. Once again - and I'm sure we can all do this now, so one, two, three, "DON'T TRUST GOOGLE"

November 11, 2016

You may have noticed recently that some Facebook status updates are in a larger font size than you may be expecting. Facebook has - without really announcing it - added this as a new feature. If your update is less than 35 characters in length, it is presented in large font, like this:

It's a bit on the irritating side, especially if you're not aware that it's going to happen. There's a few things that you can do to ensure that this doesn't happen. First of all, add in more characters to get you over the 35 character limit. Second, add in an image. Third, add in a white space image, for those times when you don't have an appropriate image to add. One of those methods should do the trick for you.

November 09, 2016

We have access to more information, quicker, easier, more effectively and at the touch of a button than we have ever had, so why am I not talking about a golden age of information? I'm writing this on the morning that we discovered that Donald Trump has been elected to the White House, and only a few months after Britain committed its own act of national insanity by voting for Brexit. There are many more intelligent people than I am who will be talking about this, but I wanted to look at just one small aspect of both events, and indeed more generally in society from the viewpoint of someone who works with information, and information professionals.

I can go on for hours about how much information is now available to us via social media, but there are plenty of other sites that can go into that for you. However, the amount of data itself isn't the problem, it's what we do, or don't do with it. We don't discriminate. 'It's all on Google' is a cry that we hear all to often, and people seem to think that a search gives us good and accurate information. You and I know that isn't the case; in fact it can be exactly the opposite. However, the vast majority of people will simply look at some results on the first page, see a result that chimes with them, read and accept it. An Ofcom survey in 2015 found that only 60% of adults think that some websites will be accurate or unbiased and some won't be, 23% think that information returned by search engines is true and unbiased and 14% simply don't think about it. We are all too ready to simply accept what we see and read without thinking it through any further, and our own biases and preconceptions end up being reinforced by our own filter bubbles. Lots of reasons for this - we don't have time to check, we're lazy, or we simply want to accept what we read is accurate and doesn't challenge our own world views.

A second problem is that of fake news. There are dozens of websites that claim to provide us with news, but in actual fact, all of the 'news' is made up. The 'National Report' for example describes itself as "America's #1 Independent News Source" You have to dig deep into the site to find out that all of its articles are fakes (or if you prefer, 'lies') and that it's satire. It's not uncommon to see satire sites being mistaken for genuine news outlets, and their stories get copied, shared and repeated across social media. And of course, that's the whole point; the more outrageous the story, the more people read it, and the more will click on one of the adverts on the page, making in some cases thousands of pounds for the owner of the site. Fake news is big business, and there's no sign at all of this slowing down. Twitter and Facebook don't help matters here, since they just provide another way for people to link to the stories. Facebook got rid of their own human news checkers, and they now rely on automated methods. This has led to a proliferation of 'dust clouds of nonsense' as President Obama described it. There are plenty of other reasons, not just financial, for these dust clouds. A nice juicy click bait story may lead to a website that tries to get you to download malware or viruses. Alternatively it may simply try and get you to visit other websites with the promise of other salacious stories. Of course, some stories will be manufactured to encourage race or religious hatred instead, or to get you to vote in one particular way. The New York Times has recently reported that Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets have exposed millions of Americans to false stories asserting that: the Clinton campaign’s pollster, Joel Benenson, wrote a secret memo detailing plans to “salvage” Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, the Clinton campaign senior strategist John Podesta practiced an occult ritual involving various bodily fluids.

The number of journalists seems to be set to decrease. The same NY Times article points out that the number of journalists has almost halved from the figure that it was in 2000. This is being replaced by citizen journalists who have no ethical or moral background, and are happy to promote their own nonsense. Mike Cernovich is a meme mastermind of the far right in America - the description comes from the New Yorker magazine in their article 'Trolls for Trump.' The memes, tweets and blog posts get thousands of hits and are retweeted, shared and copied. In a social media world where the number of followers seems more important than what's being said, a single individual can easily hold his or her own against traditional media. It becomes increasingly difficult to work out the good from the bad, the accurate from the fake, and the truth from the lie. If someone sees that a person posting on twitter has millions of followers, it's perfectly understandable to think that they have them for a good reason, and it's worth taking note of what they say - particularly if it mirrors your own world view. It's no wonder that faced with this, media groups like the Guardian are set to cut almost a third of all US jobs. What are we left with? Not a lot really, and we don't have time to work out what's good and what's bad. We can't even believe our own press, when tabloids simply peddle lies as headlines, and they can get away with it. The Daily Mail can use language reminiscent of 1930s Germany to call judges 'enemies of the people', and get away without being called to account for it.

Of course, checking this stuff is hard, and people don't like or want that. In the past you could - at least to a limited extent believe what journalists were telling you (though I appreciate that I'm on very thin ice with that comment), or at least, because you didn't have news being thrown at you every second of the day, you could sit and digest what you had read, and discuss it with other people. We don't do that any longer - we see something that we like and there's a kneejerk reaction to share it without a seconds thought. It then takes on a life of its own, and because your friend shared it to you, and you trust your friend, of course you're going to read, accept and pass it on. How often do we discuss the news these days? I suspect a lot less than we used to. Indeed - what IS the news any longer? We choose for ourselves what is news, and ignore the rest. Moreover, we want to be the ones to get that news out there - we want to be able to provide our friends with the scoop. This puts the traditional news media under intense pressure - are they going to go with a story without checking it, just to be at the forefront of the next wave, or are they going to check it, with the risk that they're going to be seen as too late with the story?

There's also an increasing mistrust of 'experts', whatever 'experts' means. Apparently Britain has had enough of experts, Michael Gove was happy to tell us in the run up to Brexit. The anti vaccination campaign - without any shred of evidence is still capable of getting people to believe in the dangers, rather than the experts who can prove without doubt that these things are safe. Religious movements use their books to tell us that the world was created 6,000 years ago, dinosaurs didn't exist, academics are lying and so on. It's not in the interest of a government to have a well educated, skeptical population - and I admit that I'm prone to the occasional conspiracy theory here - but resources such as libraries close in ever increasing numbers, and the people have to rely on Google, which will quite happily delete links to resources that the governments don't want you to see. As the amount of information doubles and doubles again, it becomes that much harder to find good, honest and accurate information.

Take another example - there's an article on a website at the moment, which I'm not going to link to, but which you can find by searching for brightside dot me and '10 ways to search Google'. This has been shared on Facebook and Twitter, and currently has over 200 comments. The problem with the article is that most of the ways listed do not work, are out of date or misunderstood. Yet people are saying how useful and helpful this is, and how they are going to share the article with their students and colleagues - this includes people who work at universities. I made the point that the article was inaccurate and was met with scorn and sarcasm - 'they're just trying to help' I was told. Of course, they were doing no such thing - the more hits, the more visits, the more clicks, the more money these people make. Why bother to fact check, or to create a useful article when it was quicker to make stuff up or simply copy work that someone else had done. Experts are not to be trusted. Donald Trump can lie 40 times a day, and people don't care. They don't care because they are so used to being lied to it doesn't mean anything any longer. They're happy to believe whatever is thrown at them. There are plenty of quotes to back this up, and worryingly they do come from sources such as Hitler and Goebells. “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." I suspect that if he had been around today he would have amended the quote to read 'if you tell a lie big enough and share and retweet it enough, people will eventually come to believe it, and share it onwards themselves'.

So yes, I think an information dark age is an apt description for where we are at the moment. People want to believe things to reinforce their world view, and if they feel powerless they want to do whatever they can, and that includes taking content and rebadging it and sharing it on social media. It's surely our role - and I believe an increasingly important one - to challenge misinformation, to teach people how to check the material that they find, to remain ever vigilant and not to fall into the same trap ourselves.